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Uganda’s Minister of Ethics and Integrity, Simon Lokodo, came out less than a week ago and proclaimed that his government didn’t support the Bahati Nazi anti-gay bill, but would let it run its course in parliament because the process couldn’t be circumvented.

Then today, the same minister got into his ministerial vehicle, drove 30 miles to Entebbe and personally scuppered a gay conference that was being attended by representatives from Amnesty International among other foreign bodies.

His excuse?

The participants were engaged in “bad things” that they should be doing in their beds. The inference that the conference was about sex of course reflects directly on the misguided and foolish, but conveniently pat, notion that homosexuality is about homo-sodomy. This is a pervasive view in the church, too, where Leviticus 18 (thou shall not lie with a man as with a woman; it is an abomination) is used to drive home the anti-gay message that the Bible condemns homosexuality – it doesn’t; the Bible condemns homo-sexual activity but not homosexual loving (feelings of attraction) which doesn’t have to involve any kind of sex whatsoever.

But I digress.

Simon Lokodo is an ex-Catholic priest. At 49, he remains unmarried, something of an oddity in Uganda but we are not here to mind his sexual business so we shall not bother to speculate as to why he remains without a wife in his middle age, or whether this might not indeed reflect on the idleness he has shown here.

What is worthy of comment is that the ineptitude this government is showing would be breath-taking if the political and personal (for the gay men and women of Uganda) stakes weren’t so high. How can a minister, even one as idle as Simon Lokodo, think that it is his place to personally put a stop to a conference convened 30 miles away from his office? Okay, he actually has no office, his ministry being there just for show, but how on earth could he think it made political sense to face the cameras and wax indignant about “bad things,” thereby showing his total ignorance of what he was talking about? Did he really think that a public gathering, in a public hotel, in the middle of the day was going to engage in sexual activity best restricted to people’s beds as he put it?

With this kind of bungling, how do these people hope to convince anyone that the government of Uganda is not supportive of the Bahati Nazi anti-gay bill?

Yoweri Museveni knows his history:

“Homosexuals have existed in our part of Africa, they were never persecuted, they were never discriminated … they were also never promoted. So the problem is on the promotion of homosexuality. … In our traditional society, the homosexuals would be known, it would not be approved but would be ignored”